Why don't more developers create AUs as well as VSTs?

[eigentone]

pain would be minimized with good design "later". You should know which is the trouble before planning a solution. And the trouble is "moving". When I started my little project CPU were single core, a 64 bit OS was more or less a dream and snow was something related with winter.

I have programs which are (nearly) inextricably tied to libraries I would rather not use. There is a huge difference in the portability (or lack of) for some programs that I have written. These days, I force myself to make libraries to be very resilient/adaptable (to the best of my knowledge). This adds time to initial development, though I believe it is made up for in the future, when debugging, porting, maintaining (aside from the ability to write better).

I can only guess that dealing with GPU acceleration technologies was a big problem. Speaking of; What are numbers for reliable low latency rendering with your program? Snow Leopard was not bad. On the audio rendering end, I can't remember anything that wasn't 64 bit ready. There were surprises/work to be done me in more general areas, such as Garbage Collection, which became very time consuming because I had a lot of long builds.

J

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

I can only guess that dealing with GPU acceleration technologies was a big problem. Speaking of; What are numbers for reliable low latency rendering with your program? Snow Leopard was not bad. On the audio rendering end, I can't remember anything that wasn't 64 bit ready. There were surprises/work to be done me in more general areas, such as Garbage Collection, which became very time consuming because I had a lot of long builds.

J

cuda was not working at all on first snow releases.... there are a lot of improvements an changements in each release, this is an other little issue...

[deraudrl]

This is a simple question to answer: resources.

VST uses 1 API, AU uses another, RTAS is a third API. And they are all different. This means anyone programming a plugin to any standard has to have:

1. development time
2. debug time
2. QA/Test time

And you need to do all 3 for each supported platform.

Some people sell APIs that try to hide all of this from you (JUCE is one example). The problem is it's never 100% abstracted so the details still leak through.

Or worse, it is 100% abstracted so you're stuck dealing with a least-common-denominator feature set.

[Dean Aka Nekro]

FXpansion's VST To AU Adapter

[Sascha Franck]

Couldn't be arsed to read the entire thread, but the bottomline is: OSX is still not widely common, at least not when it comes to anything free/cheap-ware. And the AU "standard" is a flop. Proveably, that is (especially in Logic, whose programmers are quite responsible for this "standard"). And yes, I'll happily serve you with some examples.

- Sascha (currently a Mac user, just so you know...)

[Echoes in the Attic]

Apple have no intention of giving you 64 bit Logic.

And this children, is a prime lesson in talking out your ass...